Ed Lu

Edward Tsang Lu (; born July 1, 1963) is an American physicist and former NASA astronaut. He flew on two Space Shuttle flights, and made an extended stay aboard the International Space Station.

In 2007, Lu retired from NASA to become the program manager of Google's Advanced Projects Team. In 2002, while still at NASA, Lu co-founded the B612 Foundation, dedicated to protecting the Earth from asteroid strikes, later serving as its chairman.

Early life and education Lu was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and raised in Webster, New York.

Lu attended R. L. Thomas High School, where he was a member of the wrestling team and graduated in 1980. After high school, Lu graduated from Cornell University, where he earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in electrical engineering and was a member of Pi Kappa Phi. He then earned a Master of Science (M.S.) and a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University in 1989 as a fellow of the National Science Foundation. He had demonstrated the difficulty of playing the piano instrument in space during a live in-orbit interview with CBS News and NASA TV video feed. Also on this ISS mission on October 15, 2003, Lu communicated with the crewman of China's first crewed mission into space, Yang Liwei, flying aboard Shenzhou 5. Lu congratulated the Chinese for the achievement and said in Putonghua: "Welcome to space. Have a safe journey". Malenchenko added: "I love to have somebody else in space instead of (just) me and Ed".

During the STS-106 mission, while on a space phone call with professor Lloyd Kaufman, Ed Lu observed that there is no moon illusion in space

While still employed at NASA, Lu co-founded the B612 Foundation along with former astronaut Rusty Schweickart and scientists Clark Chapman and Piet Hut. It has conducted two lines of related research to help detect asteroids that could one day strike the Earth, and find the technological means for asteroid deflection. The foundation's current goal is to design and build a privately financed asteroid-finding space telescope, Sentinel, to be launched in 2017–2018. The Sentinel's infrared telescope, once parked in an orbit similar to that of Venus, will help identify asteroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a risk of collision with Earth.

Post-NASA career

On August 10, 2007, Lu announced he was retiring from NASA to work at Google.

In June 2010, Lu left Google and worked out of the Sunfire Offices. In September 2011, Lu joined Liquid Robotics as Chief of Innovative Applications, where his work includes outreach to promote new applications for ocean science, and in 2012, he joined Hover Inc. as its Chief Technology Officer.

On June 28, 2012, Lu, with Apollo 9 Astronaut Rusty Schweickart and G. Scott Hubbard, Astronautics professor at Stanford University announced plans to build and operate the first privately-funded deep space mission called Sentinel. Their non-profit B612 Foundation will launch an infrared space telescope in orbit around the Sun, where from a distance as great as from Earth, where it would detect and track asteroids and other near-Earth objects posing threats to the planet. On October 25, 2016, B612 and Lu endorsed NASA's NEOcam proposed mission and ended the Sentinel project.

As of 2022, Lu is working on a new project to find "killer asteroids" by analyzing terabytes of archived data. So far, the B612 Foundation, cofounded by Lu, has found over 100 new potentially-threatening asteroids. This immense number-crunching effort is supported in part by Google's applied artificial intelligence project.

Personal life Lu is married and has two children.